Re: Ludicrous

Yes but the two aren't mutually exclusive.

Many patent problems are caused by the cost and difficulty for the small innovator to defend them, and the short (20 year) time frame to recoup. Ask James Dyson. It took 13 years from filing the patent to launching the product.

Short time?

I suspect the "short (20 year) time frame to recoup" is not true in a lost of high technology areas, and not for an company with some backing (which I guess was Dyson's problem?).

Possibly the only case where recouping is a long term issue to justify 20-25 years protection is in pharmaceuticals where the effective cost of bringing a drug to market is staggering, much more than the cost of its initial development, due to the length and costs for clinical trials, etc.

The original 20 years you must remember was set a LONG time ago, where products had lifetimes of 10-20 years or more. I don't think that is justified any more where products go through a generation change in 2-3 years. Certainly for software patents, if they are at all justified, something like 5 years is plenty.

The idea behind patents, of ensuring reward for the inventor and to make R&D profitable compared to copying, is good. The problem comes from how it is applied: in terms of pointlessly wide & vague patents being granted, and their use in 'blocking litigation'.

Maybe in a lot of fields some compulsory licensing arrangement with returns in proportion to the overall IP of a product's revenue would make sense, blowing away most litigation (and the resulting waste of money) and returning to success of the 'best product' and not the biggest troll.

Re: Short time?

"People change their dishwashers and vacuum cleaners every 2-3 years?"

Maybe not that frequently, but you don't even need to take out a subscription to Which? to learn that manufacturers don't really build longevity into their products these days. In some countries manufacturers whine that the statutory five year warranty is too long, although it was the mobile phone vendors whining the loudest. Which? even ran a survey eliciting details of the longest-serving appliances of their readership just for the lulz, accompanied by anecdotes of how poor the modern replacements are, often ones branded the same as the originals.

As for the suggestion that 20 years is not long enough for a patent's lifetime, accompanied by a story about Dyson needing 13 years to get his product to market, such a suggestion, especially in the context of software where implementation is usually the hard part, just goes to show that giving someone a supposedly "gold standard" monopoly on a product's technical design - we're not even talking about patents on ideas or commonly known business processes - is arguably rewarding the wrong part of the endeavour.

Not that people should be given monopolies on entire classes of activity, anyway.

5 years?

@Re: Short time?

"People change their dishwashers and vacuum cleaners every 2-3 years?"

No, but production lifetimes are commonly shorter than 5 years for a given level of technology. Today it is not uncommon for consumer-focused ICs to have last-time buy notifications after a year or so.

The original reason for patents (OK, the idealised one) was to exchange trade secrecy for the greater public good in return for a limited time monopoly on an idea so you could profit from it. You could argue that 5 years from the filing date may not be ideal, but something like "5 years from the first commercial implementation or 10 from filing" would be sufficient opportunity to profit and not a hinderence to progress.

Though I still think the biggest issues are vague/wide patents together with the real problem of an engineer knowing what, out of a few million active patents, actually apply and could become litigation-based blockers for trolls wanting big money (and not a ~0.01% expense for 1 of a few hundred IP-related items involved).

@the idea behind patents

That was the original goal. I suspect that today it would be easy enough for most products to be reverse-engineered to find out how they work, so it is not such a problem.

The principle of rewarding inventiveness is a good one, what is needed is a major update of a system that has fallen in to a disreputable state.

We need shorter times to speed progress and limit the time spent searching for potential infringement. We need changes to stop trolling (where companies wait for infringement but don't actually have any "loss" because they don't make anything), and much faster & cheaper ways of resolving license fees (so the money goes to better products, and not armies of lawyers).

John C Dvorak vs goat entrails

Before anything John Dvorak says, especially about Apple, has any relevance, Hedy Lamarr's ghost will have risen and sued everybody for using her spread spectrum broadcasting technology, thereby bankrupting the entire cellphone industry. And that will happen after the solar flares have wiped out our satellites and made terrestrial wireless communication impossible.

Yes but

Google already released their own phone, so spending 13B to fabricate some more would be waste of money perhaps. IIRC correctly Motorolas cellphone division lost money over the last few years, so I hope that Larry and Sergei do have a vision of where this purchase is going to go in the future

The patents probably have much wider scope than just the current cellphone squabbles though. There is Googles WebM technology that might be made safer by having their own patent armoury.

Motorola may have a portfolio of patents (17,000) that won't help Google....

Actually think the first smart phone - the Blade, think Software Define Radio and this purchase is check and mate to Microsoft and Apple in the SDR phone market... unless they want to go back to analog and Moto was doing analog when Jobs was riding a tri-cycle!

Re: Satan

Re: Re: Satan

Motorola is a dog.

Google has been dealing with Motorola on Android-related stuff way before the puchase idea, so they must have noticed that Moto is the worst cultural fit you could imagine. Process-bound to the point of paralysis, Moto is the antithesis of Google's instinctive, let's-wing-it culture.

"It's going to be run as a separate company," says Google. How's that going to work? Will Moto be able to run Windows Phone OS as well? Will they be able to make their own tweaks to Android (OK, given Blur, not such loss)? Will they get to keep the $3bn in cash they have in the cupboard?

Missing the point

It's too tempting to try and second guess the value of the patents. As most of us are not patent lawyers this really ends up as rooting for one side or the other. However, to claim that only the quality of the patents and not their quantity matters would seem to overlook several previously protracted battles in the past. It also assumes that judges are interested in and able to understand the technical details. I think a court in Texas is often cited as an example of where there this is not necessarily the case.

So, initially the purchase, if approved will give Google the opportunity to play the second most popular game in US business: sue and counter-sue (the most popular being mergers, acquisitions and sell-offs). This is rarely about the worthiness of a case and more about wearing down the opposition. As with takeovers, the sums involved are often irrelevant as it is usually OPM and can be created almost at will through central bank largesse. Google can now join in: Apple patents raindrops, Google patents snowflakes.

What about if Google's real aim is to reform the US patent system and have the most mickey mouse patents, of which Apple and Microsoft have a bundle, declared invalid? How about getting the US to adopt the European system which has much less scope for patenting software in the first place? Because Google doesn't make it's money from physical products it is, in a sense, ahead of the game. Apple and Microsoft's defensive use of patents doesn't look like innovation to me.

I suspect that reform of the US patent system is pretty much a certainty whether it be legislative or de facto - the sheer volume of stuff now being made and designed outside the US in China, Taiwan and Korea is tipping the scales already. How long do these financial behemoths think they can rule the roost when they effectively keep on handing over their IP to their real competitors? What is to stop Foxconn from doing a HTC / ZTE / Huawei and Samsung and start to offer its own innovations in its own products?

Really

I think Google is really, really, REALLY anxious not to invalidate software patents, because their empire is built on only one: tiny ads. Secondly, Microsoft doesn't build any phone hardware, so how would that put Google ahead of Microsoft. If anything, the nullification of obtuse software patents would favour the hardware makers. Maybe that's why Moto got bought?

Re: Missing the point

"What about if Google's real aim is to reform the US patent system and have the most mickey mouse patents, of which Apple and Microsoft have a bundle, declared invalid?"

This wouldn't surprise me one bit. It would also have the pleasing side-effect of shutting Florian Mueller up, since he claims that big business loves patents (I wonder why) and that's the only voice that should count. Saying that "We've got all these patents but they're just shit and I say abolish the system now!" might turn a few heads in the right direction.

Very impressive. . .

The posts on this thread mooting the idea that Google bought these patents in order to reform or even abolish the US software patent system are among the stupidest posts which I have *ever* read on this site.

Yes Turtle

I'd have to agree with that. A lot of people seem to find it hard to separate the wonderful, benevolent overlord image they have of Google from the reality that they are another major multinational corporation like Apple & MS. Everyone has a favourite technology company, that doesn't mean they are your friends or your fairy god mother.

Re: Big biz *doesn't* love patents?

"Or is the meaning here that Florian Müller defending patents for Big Biz?"

He has said that Big Business can claim that they need patents to become that big, and since they are big, make lots of money, employ lots of people, they can thus persuade politicians that patents are a precondition for large-scale wealth creation. If a very big business wipes its big bottom on the idea of patents using its own patents as the TP, that sends a different signal: that patents are irrelevant to wealth creation and it isn't just someone who doesn't have any making the complaint.

Crazy like a...

I would give some credence to Google being crazy like a fox if it weren't for things like David Drummond's blog rants about the competition. He reminds me of the Sicilian switching wine cups in The Princess Bride and attempting to rationalize the situation. Oh, and BTW, pending patents are just that...pending. Nothing's in the bag and it's not as if the competition doesn't also have a lot in that class.

As I said...

I still think this deal is less about the patent portfolio than forcing Apple to take on Google's fat lawyer pool instead of it's Android partners who will be more easily bullied by Apple. Google could sell the hardware business on in a couple of years after it's had the fight with Apple it wants.

Re: Google's Lawyers

1) What makes you think that Apple, a corporation with much more money than Google, and *much* more experience in winning patent infringement suits, would be intimidated by Google's lawyers - even if Google's lawyers were armed with MMI's already-proven-to-be-non-deterring patents?

2) Much more to the point, if Google wanted to help its Android partners against Apple, it would first apply to the judge in whatever litigation is ongoing for permission to intervene - like Apple itself did in the Lodsys case. They could also offer to indemnify their partners, or pay for their defense - neither of which they have done. They would not *start* by spending $12.5bn for MMI and a patent portfolio that has not protected Motorola from Apple, and *then* pay their lawyers to assert these already-proven-to-be-non-deterring patents against Apple. Well, not in the real world, anyway.